After an exhaustive search I selected Peta Wilson from TV's La Femme Nikita for the honor.
In the movie Nikita is a drug addled teen who is a cop killer. They cleaned her up for the TV show, turning her into an innocent young flower who had been framed, then had her suicide faked, so they could recruit her into program where they turned her into a deadly assassin.
Aside from catching snippets of it while channel surfing, I never actually watched the show for any length of time. However, it gets pretty good reviews. Apparently there was a lot of ambiguity in both her character and the Organization she worked for between the 'ends justify the means' approach in their service of a good cause and some of the characters bumping against the struggles with their conscience when required to do some truly nasty things.
As an aside, Joel Surnow, the creator of 24, was a script writer on La Femme Nikita, so I guess Nikita is perhaps a bit of a proto Jack Bauer. It sounds interesting -- has anybody seen it? Was it any good?
BIN LADEN'S DEATH AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR JIHADISM
By Scott Stewart, May 3, 2011
U.S. President Barack Obama appeared in a hastily arranged televised address the night of May 1, 2011, to inform the world that U.S. counterterrorism forces had located and killed Osama bin Laden. The operation, which reportedly happened in the early hours of May 2 local time, targeted a compound in Abbottabad, a city located some 31 miles north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. The nighttime raid resulted in a brief firefight that left bin Laden and several others dead. A U.S. helicopter reportedly was damaged in the raid and later destroyed by U.S. forces. Obama reported that no U.S. personnel were lost in the operation. After a brief search of the compound, the U.S. forces left with bin Laden's body and presumably anything else that appeared to have intelligence value. From Obama's carefully scripted speech, it would appear that the U.S. conducted the operation unilaterally with no Pakistani assistance -- or even knowledge.
As evidenced by the spontaneous celebrations that erupted in Washington, New York and across the United States, the killing of bin Laden has struck a chord with many Americans. This was true not only of those who lost family members as a result of the attack, but of those who were vicariously terrorized and still vividly recall the deep sense of fear they felt the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as they watched aircraft strike the World Trade Center Towers and saw those towers collapse on live television, and then heard reports of the Pentagon being struck by a third aircraft and of a fourth aircraft prevented from being used in another attack when it crashed in rural Pennsylvania. As that fear turned to anger, a deep-seated thirst for vengeance led the United States to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 and to declare a "global war on terrorism."
Because of this sense of fulfilled vengeance, the death of bin Laden will certainly be one of those events that people will remember, like the 9/11 attacks themselves. In spite of the sense of justice and closure the killing of bin Laden brings, however, his death will likely have very little practical impact on the jihadist movement. More important will be the reaction of the Pakistani government to the operation and the impact it has on U.S.-Pakistani relations.
Foundations
To understand the impact of bin Laden's death on the global jihadist movement, we must first remember that the phenomenon of jihadism is far wider than just the al Qaeda core leadership of bin Laden and his closest followers. Rather than a monolithic entity based on the al Qaeda group, jihadism has devolved into a far more diffuse network composed of many different parts. These parts include the core al Qaeda group formerly headed by bin Laden; a network of various regional franchise groups such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); and last, a broad array of grassroots operatives who are adherents to the jihadist ideology but who are not formally affiliated with the al Qaeda core or one of the regional franchises. [continued after jump]
